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ASP Menu advice

Hi,
So I am pretty much a beginner at web page development. I've done most of my stuff through regular old html with a little bit of javascript on them. I am doing mostly minor tweaking for SEO and visual aspects on a website http://www.ericksson.net and I noticed that the guy who originally made the site called the menu from a separate file instead of coding it into the page.

I was also wondering if this might negatively affect seo since that's mostly what my purpose here is. I just wanted to get some feedback since I'm a little cautious as this is my first asp site.

I'm also confused about the div hiddenimages on the site just below the menu and don't understand why it's there. Would simply deleting this part mess up the menu possibly?

If anyone has some sort of advice or suggestions it would be greatly appreciated. I just don't want to accidentally mess up the site

I took a look at the site, and the code that is available. I don't see any 'hidden' div tags. Every single one of the are used, the entire page is placed in a div tag as well, and many more are opened and closed through out the page. My guess would be that if you delete the div's you are going to run into an issue, especially if you get rid of what is between them. I personally don't use the div tag unless its on a lone element, or in a table, and I need some more formatting, or something to call from javascript.

Also, in the many sites I have worked on, I find that, even though it takes more work, that placing the entire page into tables is far more compatible, as ensures that items are placed where I want them, even when the site is viewed on a really small screen. So as you have mentioned, I would ditch the div's for tables and work out the positioning. When I do this I have much better positioning, and I don't have to define a billion absolute positions properties with everything.

I took a look at the site, and the code that is available. I don't see any 'hidden' div tags.

Thanks for taking a look. the div I was talking about is div hiddenimages and is located on lines 74-78 as part of the header. Even stranger is that when I "inspect element" in chrome and run the cursor over each line, it shows them being just below the menu in a nonsensical order. If I can't figure out whats going on there, I think I'm gonna just scrap the whole thing and redo it. I'll keep the code somewhere of course

Alright I see it, the specific lines there were helpful. To tell you the truth it looks like the previous dev was preloading those images. If you notice in the code above that, line 63-73, the dev is using javascript to swap out the images when the mouse rolls over them. Then he hides and preloads the image when the page is read by the browser. If you don't keep it, the images, though doubtful these days with faster internet, the images may take a second to appear.

Most of the time, and especially since you have access to all the included javascript files, you would just make a function that you put in the body tag like so:

Code:

<body onload="LoadUpMyImages();">

Then either in the script tag in the head, or in an included javascript file you would have a function called LoadUpMyImages, like so:

Code:

//Preload my images, and I can reuse mi = new Image() for every image I want to preload
function LoadUpMyImages(){ mi = new Image(); mi.src="images/WhatEverTheHellImage.jpg"; }